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A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
Book Reviewed by:Called a "masterpiece" (Ali Smith), this stunning novel explores desire and anxiety, beauty and youth, memory and power.
Paris, a winter's night in 1983. The girl is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. Set in Oslo, New York, and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a bravura quest through layers of oblivion that probes the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris. Girl, 1983 is a raw, stark, and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.
On a winter's night in 1983, a 16-year-old girl is lost on the streets of Paris. She's been in the city for less than 24 hours and can't remember the name of her hotel; she's alone and scared. All she has in her pocket is the address of "K," the forty-something fashion photographer who's lured her to the French capital with a promise to get her picture in Vogue. She wants to go home—back to New York, back to her mother, who pleaded with her not to come. But it's after midnight and snow is piling up on the sidewalk: what other choice does she have? She makes her way to K's place, suspecting what might be in store. Girl, 1983 is the second installment of what Ullmann plans to be a trilogy "meditating on memory, rage and desire," an organizing principal which is more emotional than chronological. The first volume, Unquiet, focused on her relationship with her father as he neared death; in its second, the world-famous director is all but absent. But whatever the subject, any future work with the same depth and intensity can only be good news...continued
Full Review
(647 words)
(Reviewed by Alex Russell).
Ali Smith, author of Gliff
This book, about how we meet and understand the powers and the powerful vulnerabilities that form and have formed us, is written with extraordinary courage and a spirit that astounds. It's a work of real strength: poetic, witty, vital, cool and fevered both at once. Girl, 1983 does more than hold the self at all its ages. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension. I think it's a masterpiece. Rachel Cusk, author of Parade
Linn Ullman's writing, already distinct for its rare moral clarity, attains a new authority in Girl, 1983. It is the authority of focus, of a grip on life that grows more tenacious as its scope determinedly narrows. In the manner of Annie Ernaux, Ullman uses the act of attention as a weapon against indifference. It is as though by reconstructing the disorder of certain realities, she is able to confer sanity on them. Yet there is also a brightness and generosity to her work that seems to turn its themes—the powerlessness of youth and femininity, the intermingling of memory and shame—inside out.
In Girl, 1983, Linn Ullmann uses the tools of fiction to dissect a teenaged narrator's traumatic encounter with an older man. That narrator's biography has numerous parallels to Ullmann's own, including a turbulent adolescence divided among New York, Norway, and Sweden—the result of being the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and director Ingmar Bergman, two of the most important European cultural figures of the 20th century.
The elder Ullmann and Bergman met in 1965, when she was in her mid-20s and he was in his mid-40s. Both were married at the time; Bergman had in fact been married four times already and had seven children. The director was by this point one of Europe's foremost filmmakers, having achieved international ...
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Every good journalist has a novel in him - which is an excellent place for it.
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